She's eaten, prayed and loved. So now the writer is publishing a history of botany, of course

Your book The Signature of All Things is a novel. Why fiction?
I already did the hardest homework assignment of my life: I wrote the book that came after Eat, Pray, Love. I'd never felt more free as a writer once Committed was finished. It was time to write a novel and to go big with it.

The book's name refers to a theory that there's a divine imprint on everything. Do you have sympathy for that view?
I have a great deal of sympathy for any cockamamie theory that tries to find meaning in randomness. It was an...